Thursday, July 6, 2017

RANDOM HARVEST -- James Hilton

If you
don't like spoilers, don't read the Wikipedia entry for Random
Harvest.
I'm glad I waited until after, although by then I was feeling a tad
foolish for letting James Hilton keep a bright guy like me from
guessing the ending. Other things bothered
me about Random
Harvest:
It
got me to wondering if I really am the sentimental dupe I'd been
joking in several prior reviews here about being, and it made me feel
hopelessly ingenuous, like a bumbling oaf, reading how sophisticated
the British gentry tend to be (I might have said naïve
or callow
had Hilton not used the more sophisticated ingenuous).

A
couple of things got me past these
discomforts, to keep me reading. One was Hilton's irritating use of
ALL CAPS to emphasize certain words. Possibly the typesetter was to
blame for not using italics, but Hilton went way overboard in
assuming we couldn't get the emphasis from context alone. To wit:
"Not that Charles would be an easy man to MAKE happy, even if he
HAD got the right woman. But he isn't happy NOW—that I DO know—"
Being irritated by so
much of that
made me feel a tad critical,
less
ingenuous, and eventually it got to where I hardly noticed it. And
this was because of the other thing that helped me forget how
inferior I am to the British gentry:
Hilton's superior writing and storytelling. Random
Harvest
is so good it didn't bother me that I could never write that well or
think up a story that good.

Here's
some of that writing that grabbed me and held on, a description of
London with
surgical insight and the—dare I say it—sophistication of a
literary mind:

There was a charm, a deathless
charm, about a city whose inhabitants went about muttering, "The
nights are drawing in," as if it were a spell to invoke the
vast, sprawling creature-comfort of winter. Indeed no phrase, he once
said, better expressed the feeling of curtained enclosure, of almost
stupefying cosiness, that blankets London throughout the dark
months—a sort of spiritual central heating, warm and sometimes
weepy, but not depressing—a Dickensian, never a Proustian fug.

Now to the story. Were I
Hilton trying to entice a prospective literary agent to read my
query, I'd call Random Harvest a
"romantic mystery" first. If that didn't work, I'd try
another agent with "mystery/romance" or, better yet,
"mysterious romance", and so on until one ultimately took
the bait and read my irresistible plot synopsis, which would go
something likethis:

Harrison,
a Cambridge graduate student, has an oddly engaging
conversation with a garrulous stranger on a train. They
meet by coincidence later at Harrison's college, where the stranger,
whom we now know is Charles Rainier, wealthy industrialist and member
of Parliament, is the speaker. They hit it off, and Rainier soon
hires Harrison as his personal secretary. Rainier confides in
Harrison, explaining the oddness of their train conversation was a
result of his memory loss from the moment of a WWI battlefield injury
to his waking up two years later on a park bench in Liverpool. He
remembered enough to learn his name and find his family, whose
industrial empire he then saves from ruin during a stock market
crash. All the while his memory is returning incrementally in déjà
vu-like
flashes and fragments that haunt him with a vague sense of some sort
of significance but nothing more. The breakthrough comes when he
remembers he'd gotten married during the missing two years and that
his wife was pregnant when he left her temporarily to meet with an
editor in Liverpool, hoping to sell some stories he'd written. He
arrives, slips on a rainy street, is hit by a car, and wakes up on
the bench with the hole in his memory. Now, twenty years later, the
hole is finally filled in, and he's off alone to find the love of his
life. Harrison and Rainier's current wife, whom his respects but
doesn't love, set out to find him.

If the agent were to read this
far, I would add that a backdrop to Rainier's story is the
encroaching threat of WWII, and its effect on the British
sensibility. There's much talk of the malignant presence of Adolf
Hitler, England's passivity despite a growing anxiety, and the League
of Nations' impotence.

Here's Rainier's take on it:

We are like people in a
trance—even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing
to avert it—like the dream in which you drive a car towards a
precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no physical
power to press down. We should be arming now, if we had sense,—arming
day and night and seven days of the week,—for if the Munich pact
had any value at all it was not as a promise of peace to come, but as
a last-minute chance to prepare for the final struggle. And we are
doing NOTHING— caught in the net of self-delusion and
self-congratulation.

And here he is expounding on
Hitler in words that, although Random Harvest was
published in 1941, read as if they just might, with a change in
tense, be found in something current, such as The Atlantic:
“...the fact that all seemed to depend on the workings of one
abnormal human mind gave every amateur psychologist an equal chance
with politicians and crystal-gazers. And behind this mystery came
fear, fear of a kind that had brought earlier peoples to their knees
before eclipses and comets—fear of the unknown, based on an
awareness that the known was no longer impregnable.”

"If
you forgive people enough you belong to them, and they to you,
whether either person likes it or not squatter's rights of the
heart." -- James Hilton

I might also play the “crystal
gazer” and state with confidence that Random Harvest
not only would become one of the top-selling novels of 1941, but its
movie adaptation would win an Academy Award nomination.

The title, you may be
wondering, what in hell does it mean? This citation, appearing on the
novel's title page, might be a clue: "According to a
British Official Report, bombs fell at Random." —German
Official Report

2 comments:

I don't think I have read anything by James Hilton, although I may have read Lost Horizon. When I was very young I used to read more of a variety of books. This does sound very good, I enjoy reading about that time period. The CAPS in the text would also bother me, but I could probably accept it if I was enjoying the book very much. (Wikipedia does include spoilers for book plots quite often, I never read anything about a book or movie there until I have read or watched it.)

I read Lost Horizon first, Tracy, after Bill Crider's review a week or so back. Enjoyed it, but didn't want to review it for FFB, so I picked Random Harvest. I now also have Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Was it Murder on my Kindle app. He's a fine writer.